Thirty-six years ago, the man who would become my husband and I danced together, yet separately, on the Nepenthe terrace in celebration of All Hallows’ Eve. I say separately, because that night we had decided to surprise each other and change into our costumes in secret, with the challenge to discover one another once the party had begun.
I was a quasi-geisha girl with white face paint and black kimono and chopsticks in my upswept hair. I remember thinking, “How hard could it be to find someone who is six foot five?” But on that terrace in that charcoal light, in the nutty-sage-infused air that is the scent of Big Sur, everyone was six- foot-five. And so I danced, mostly alone, through the hours and another young man promised to marry me, but he was not the one I sought under the full moon.
At midnight, when the music stopped playing, a tall, thin Russian Cossack with a Casper the Friendly Ghost face whirled around me, and with great panache, flicked off his mask to reveal my lover’s smile. He laughed and said he had been spinning around me all night long. How was it that I had never seen him? And yet, he had recognised me so easily among the masqueraders in the silken darkness of a warm Big Sur night.
This past Halloween, we sat on that same terrace, he and I, and swayed to the oldies of the Motown band and marvelled at all the time that seemed to have evaporated between these two October evenings. Many masks have been removed in the span of over three decades, but the sweetest and truest of relationships are those where the slimmest disguise is worn.
This year we each knew what the other’s costume would be. Still, I believe that had that not been the case, and even though the moon was now in her last quarter, I could find my love within the throng of colourful, anonymous dancers just as effortlessly as he had once found me all those evenings ago at our first Bal Masque.